Creative techniques

Metaphor creates intimacy, builds understanding

People who read metaphors are more likely to understand what someone else is thinking.

Or so say Andrea Bowes and Albert Katz, two researchers at the University of Western Ontario (London).… Read the full article

Siddhartha Mukherjee clarifies cancer with comparison

If you were … say … a brilliant oncologist and a spectacular writer, and you wanted to tell the story of cancer in a way that people who weren’t brilliant oncologists could understand and enjoy it, what literary tools might you use?… Read the full article

Make messages vivid with metaphor

Analogy makes your benefits more tantalizing by making them more tangible. So use metaphor and simile to make your concepts concrete.… Read the full article

Kindle your creativity

All these years later, I’m still grateful for the Kindle app on my iPad.

I thought the thing I’d love most about reading on my devices would be the extra mini-fridge-sized space it leaves in my luggage for necessities like thick Marimekko sweaters and airport-sized Fazer chocolate bars that I collect on my trips.… Read the full article

‘This isn’t dessert, it’s a diabetic coma on a plate’

“The thing about food writing is that there are only about fifteen adjectives you can use — ‘delicious,’ ‘delectable,’ ‘unctuous’ …”

— Tom Parker Bowles, the food writer at Tatler, the British society magazine and author of The Year of Eating Dangerously

The problem with modifiers — delicious, delectable, unctuous — is that they don’t paint pictures in your readers’ minds.… Read the full article

Engage your readers’ senses with metaphor

In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor described a character as “a young woman in slacks…

“… whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage.”

… Read the full article

Analogy sharpens your message

When Gerald Ford assumed the presidency in the wake of Watergate, he wanted Americans to know they were getting a simple, plain-spoken leader.… Read the full article